THE CHILDREN'S HOUR

A group of grown men, Congressmen all, were shot on a baseball field and did nothing about gun control.

A group of children, students all, were shot in their classrooms and are about to do more than any politician of the last few decades.

We all know that youth shall inherit the earth.  I guess because of the world that we live in, they just have to inherit it a lot earlier.

Every single day, our innocence and our craving for it dies a little bit more.

Life has become like the flowers at Stop and Shop.  They look alive and vital when you leave, but in less than an hour they wilt and die on you.

All this while “Frozen” debuts on Broadway and Ben Brantley has already, well, shot it down. 

 How emblematic can you possibly get?

Part of being an American is holding on to the beauty and dreams of childhood.   

We are, at an early age, pumped up with heroes and promises.  We do not learn about whether or not Henry Hudson or Christopher Columbus had huge personality issues.  (They did)

We are raised to be idealized.  To feel pangs of love when we see our flag wave or when our President magically encapsulates our deep love of humanity by delivering one galvanizing, stirring speech in honor of love and country.

The movies that we all grew up on and still cling to, like “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “The Sound of Music” are brush up courses that keep us right on course.  They exist to remind us that we Americans are devout optimists who act selflessly under the most seemingly hopeless of situations.

Sporting events always begin with the singing of our national anthem and from there we believe to the very last two minutes of the bottom of the ninth that we will eyewitness a miracle and will triumphantly win on that field of dreams.

Baseball is the place where men can act like boys and boys can dream of being men.

When we enter an actual war, we harken back to stories of wars past, which informs us that no matter what the odds, the good guy always wins and the bad guys lose.   The sad reality is that today we are at war every single day as terrorists and mentally ill white men, armed with military grade weapons of mass destruction turn us into moving targets in a heartbeat, every single day.  More people in America had been assassinated by gunfire than all our battlefields combined.

And yet we still go through the motions of celebrating the birthdays of our most beloved presidents and our country itself with fireworks.

TCM recently showed the film “Ah, Wilderness,” which was written by the prince of darkness himself, the playwright Eugene O’Neal.   It was an atypical, light comedy/recollection of his turn-of-the-century American childhood, where innocence and morality were vigilantly enforced.  

The film is all aglow with its wise and grizzled Lionel Barrymore father figure who was clearly butter in the hands of his savvy perennially aproned wife.  (Trivia: Dad was originally going to be played by Will Rogers who played the part in stage versions).  

The story was about temptation and love.  The kind of love we are talking about is best defined by the face of the college-bound son who stares at the moon for the misbegotten and longs to have his first kiss.  

Evidently, that character was based on O’Neal himself.  That could be true or it was just his sadness of innocence lost…or, given plays like ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” innocence never experienced.

I happen to love the films of the 30’s and 40’s because, despite a stock market crash and a world war, America had the likes of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland to whip us up into a patriotic and slap-happy kind of bliss.   There was generosity too.  In those days you got two movies, a short and a cartoon and you got to see them in movie palaces that were literally palaces, which made you feel like you were royalty.

In those days America didn’t see the war of Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk.  Mass murder was not splashed in front of everyone’s face.  We fought the war by doing our part.  By sacrificing, by raising money for war bonds and taking off our lights at night.

I did not live in those days.  I’m a kid of the fifties and by the time I was ready to take on the world, Elvis was on his way out and the first deep sorrow that I felt was when JFK was assassinated.

Europe had yet to get over the somber mourning of World War Two and after years of light and Camelot magic, we suddenly joined them, brothers and sisters of global despair.

And then came the Beatles, a propulsive invading army of harmony, melody, and hand clapping joy to rescue us all.  Combined with their cheeky irreverence, which quickly melted the hearts of the most cynical of Kennedy Airport reporters, we were literally swept up in their impossible to resist rapture which still exists to this day.  1964 thru 1970 was a quantum leap on every single level.   We were all basically Annie adopted by Daddy Peacebucks.   We wore COLORS and took drugs that made it seem like Alice in Wonderland was non-fiction.  We grew our hair Rapunzel-  long and discovered that we could have splendor in the grass while we sang like kindergarten children at concerts and in our poster slathered bedrooms.

Along the way, the drugs turned psychedelic and the insanity of war which threatened to wipe out all the good vibrations was met with our own unique brand of protest and occasional violence.

Life and Nixon and Agnew had a habit of being the assholes at the party who wanted to ruin everything by killing kids your own age in a war that they knew we were incapable of winning.  

By the time we hit 1970, even The Beatles had enough.  So did Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimmy Hendricks.  Keith Moon and Jim Morrison were ticking time bombs.

The 70’s turned into a coke head bacchanal whose address was Studio 54.  We went from Playdough to Plato’s Retreat and the AIDIES were just around the corner.   

We were no longer Angels in America.  

We needed Angels in America. 

And we got our share.  Some of those angels were Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Carol King, the Eagles, Laura Nyro, Paul Simon, Dan Fogelberg and Jackson Browne.  To dance we had Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind and Fire, Elton John and Sly and the Family Stone.   The movies had Rocky ready to fight against impossible odds.  TV was ready to hatch the Not Ready For Prime Time Players.  

Art always seems to know how to rescue us, because in those days youth controlled both the audience and the networks and studios.  As long as we had Linc, Pete, and Julie, who were SO not pigs, crime would never pay.

Which brings me to today.

Buzzkill alert: this will not be groovy.

I have already said that Cynthia Nixon should not run for Governor of New York, but should instead run against Trump because frankly, a President Nixon has to be better than this.

Trump (just saying that word kickstarts the buzz kill just like that) has never known innocence and unlike Eugene O’Neal, he does not even try to conjure it up because he has no concept of it.

What you have been eye-witnessing over these last 400+ days is as far removed from the America that we all grew up in as it could possibly be.

Trump never had a childhood.  He had an indulgence and the only toys that he has ever had are demolition equipment and women.

Just look at his parade to come.   That, my friends, is Toys-R-U.S.

I have long said that Trump is nothing more than a trust fund idiot who stomps on real estate like Godzilla, who doesn’t care about the lives that he ruins either.  His staggering need for omnipotence (which is really a case of staggering impotence), being impossible to attain given that he has no talent, no thoughts, no vision, no skills and is incapable of empathy, means that his only option is to be belligerent and right by any means necessary which to me, is the definition of weakness.

Looking back, the Presidents who won our hearts were all father figures.  Lincoln. FDR. JFK.  Obama.    To name a few.  We even call our original team The Founding Fathers because they took care of us.

Our country was built as a direct response to tyranny.

Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were a loving valentine to the everyday American man, woman, and child which GUARANTEED our inalienable rights.

They invented the word President because they did not want a King or an Emperor or an orangutan orange, bleached blonde Caligula in charge of Ground Nero.

They also did not have the AR-15 in mind when they wrote about creating a militia should it be necessary to protect our country.

The fact that FOX News, which disseminates Third Reich quality bullshit like Tokyo Rose, infecting the minds of the gullible, the needy, the racist and the just plain stupid, is now the Farm club for the White House.

To hire  a war-hungry psychotic pig likeJohn Bolton to be in charge of our national security is revelatory simply because it clearly reveals the inner Trump.  In Bolton he sees his xenophobic rage and genocidal nature.  He gets to act out his contempt four decorated generals who tell him what to do just like his superiors did at military school. Generals earned their stars and hearts.  Trump has earned nothing.  He has achieved nothing but Kim Kardashian level celebrity.  He has consorted with thugs and spent most of his time dirty money laundering and even selling out our country by allowing Steve Bannon to hire Cambridge Analytica (which sounds like a porn star to me) who was hired to figure out a way to sell his willing fool.

All he had to do was sell the ad campaign and Facebook fake news to the Soviets who did all the groundwork.  

I believe that Trump thinks he did not collude with the Russians because he is not smart enough to walk across the street without getting hit several times. 

Trump is a low-level dumpster rat who knows how to survive by destroying the lives of other dumpster rats.  That is his only true talent.

 By virtue of the way that he reacts to it, I also believe that the Christopher Steele dossier has all the evidence that is needed to prove that Trump has been long owned by Putin.  Hence the fucking congratulatory phone call.   He lauded a fixed election, while just a year ago he was bitching that he was the victim of one.

Trump from day one was told what to do in exchange for him and his slithering greed infested children to be able to keep pushing the Trump brand around the world while he was in the Oval Office.  He was told that he would never have to make a decision.  That he could arrive late, leave early, play all the golf he wanted, throw all the parties he liked and watch all the TV he wanted while he got to have off-road sex.  

Ah but hubris and profound stupidity have taken hold.

Trump who has settled one court case after another, for the first time in his slime ridden life is trapped on all sides.  By Mueller.  By a Playmate, a Porn Star and a Reality game show contestant.  This is his version of a Christmas Carol.  Ebenezer Trump is simply fucked.  

While behind closed doors, as he always has, he is throwing temper tantrums and firing anyone who doesn’t look or sound like his inner child, he is spinning out of control.

And to have Bolton at his side his like having (insert your favorite SS officer here).

Now, let’s take a breath and return to the earlier, gentler part of this piece.

We as Americans are, right now, the ad exec with an ulcer/train passenger who keeps dreaming of the quaint, never- ever land of turn of the century Willoughby in one of my favorite episodes of Twilight Zone.

We just can’t take it anymore and if it means leaping off a train to escape we will.

Being that Rod Serling will remain my forever hero, I look at anything he wrote as the profound, postmodern cautionary tale that it was meant to be.  

 He specialized in creating human x-rays which showed our darkest and most fearful sides.

But he did not suggest that what the characters did was a prescription for life.

He wanted us to grasp the concept of the subtext, learn from it and act accordingly, as good, decent people.

And that is the answer for right now.

Once again, just like the good old days of the sixties, YOUTH is heading for Washington to PROTEST and they will NOT GIVE UP until there is the kind of change that will keep our kids from being scared for their lives in American classrooms.

If the baseball wounded Congressmen don’t show you the truth of American politics nothing will.  And one of them, who is beyond anti-LGBT was tended to by a lesbian.

Sadly we are living with the new Christianity whose flock gathers in their cross topped coven to celebrate exclusion and hate.

That God group despises evolution because evolution is the ultimate threat.  It means having to evolve from the life that they know, which includes loving guns more than they do your children and trying to “fix” homosexuals and prevent them from expressing the very kind of love that their boy Jesus loves to talk about.

We are engaged in an undeclared Civil War, which is an extension of the one that has never ended.

The South hates the North.

The North hates the South.

And the GOP does not give a flying fuck about either one.

Even worse, our sitting President, who is emasculated and publicly humiliated almost by the hour, believes that his only recourse is a show of nuclear force that could destroy the world, simply because his own world has already been de-balled.

Sitting in the oval office is not the same as sitting high atop an ivory filled Tower,  with your name EMBLAZONED, where you get to sit on a ruby encrusted toilet, wearing a crooked Burger King crown, remarkably resembling Charles Laughton as the hunchback, while believing to your core that you deserve everything that you want and if you can’t get it, steal it.  Because it is yours. 

You see, underneath that orange Revlon makeup and bleached blonde Cinnabon bald covering swirl, is a fat, lazy, dumber than dirt, scared to death child who is willing to destroy our planet if because he control his own.

So it is time for us to become both the Fathers and Mothers of our country.

It is time to take away his privileges.

It is time to put him in a permanent timeout.

It is time for you to stop feeling like a victim, screaming at the TV every time either he or his swine before pearls press secretary talks to you like you are as gullible and retarded as his foolish lemming base who will believe anything that they are told.

It is time to return America back to itself, back to the days when our own child-like behavior ruled supreme.  The real children of the world hit the streets on the day before Stormy Daniels is going to tell all on Sixty Minutes.

Which is the same day that too much of America will be in church acting like Germany of the 1930s, sipping flutes of bubbling Kool-Aid while praying to a God who reinforces the fantasy that anyone who doesn’t act, think or match the color of their skin should be walled-in or shot in the back twenty times in their own backyard armed with nothing but a phone.

It’s time to stop the grown-ups from ruining our lives.

It is time to join the children, by becoming one again.

The ones who are outspoken, compassionate and most of all, American.

#March
#Gun Control
#Trump
#Bolten
#Parkview